Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_stock_london.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig. 1: The number of council homes by borough.
You might have seen the headlines in the past week, about the crisis in council finances linked to the rising costs of providing temporary accommodation. Local authorities in the UK have a prevention duty, a statutory obligation to mitigate people becoming homeless. Historically, the states intervention would have been to identify suitable council housing.
You might have seen the recent headlines about the crisis in council finances linked to the costs of providing temporary accommodation.
In the UK local authorities have a prevention duty, a statutory obligation to mitigate people becoming homeless. Historically, the typical state intervention would be to find suitable council housing in the local area. However, increasingly local authorities don’t have enough council housing available, and are instead placing people in accommodation the council leases from the private sector. This accommodation can range from private rental flats, to hotels or hostels. In the last x years, the number of people owed a duty of prevention has reached x, leading to some areas spending over 20% of their total council budget on securing temporary accommodation; aggravating the finances of councils already on the brink of bankruptcy. This situation has been dubbed a crisis in temporary housing.
Aside from the financial cost, the type of accommodation provided as temporary accommodation has been heavily criticised. Firstly it is often not temporary, with people stuck in this accommodation limbo for years. Secondly the accommodation is often not suitable for habitation, with notable examples lacking space, cooking facilities, or even windows making the news. This is perhaps particularly disturbing considering that in 2024, 25% of households owed a relief duty were families with children.
The most obvious solution to the temporary accommodation crisis, would be if there was suitable council housing available. More council housing would allow for temporary accommodation to just be a stop gap (as originally intended) before permanent accommodaiton is found, and by provdiign permament accommodation for people, it would reduce future inicidents on people requiring a prevention duty. The crisis in temporary accommodation is part of the broader housing crisis in the UK. In response to the current housing crisis, the UK government has set ambitious housebuilding targets for their term in office, this includes 81,000 residential units being built per year in London. This got me wondering what, if anything, councils have been doing to address the lack of council housing. Here I’m going to look specifically at the situation in London — the city I live and work in, the city there is publicly acessible data for, and the city which is at the epicentre of the UK housing crisis.
What happened to all the state owned housing?
So why is there a lack of state owned accommodation to place people needing housing in? The peak of council housing construction in the UK was in the early 1950s, when there was a significant push to improve living standards in the wake of the second world war. The rate of council housing construction has been in decline ever since. Following the introduction of right to buy by the Thatcher government in 1980, there has been a further large scale sell off of council housing into private ownership. As you can see in Fig. 1, the stock of council housing in London has precipitously declined since the 1980, with the rate somewhat stabilising since 2012.
There have been a few cases of ‘failed’ council housing estates being demolished to make way for redevelopment - an example of this is Robin Hood Gardens 1. Sometimes the council housing units lost will be replaced by new units on local developments.
Of the remaining stock of council housing, there have been controversies about lack of council maintenance leading to poor living conditions, such as black mould. This is seemingly due to councils struggling to renovate, or retrofit these properties, possibly due to financial constraints, but also the housing crisis making it difficult to rehouse people for essential maintenace to be carried out.
Analysing the planning applications
The Planning London Datahub is a dataset I’ve recently been working with, it’s an open dataset of all planning applications maintained by the Greater London Authority (GLA). Looking across all 33 local authority districts in London (the 32 boroughs plus City of London), we can start to see what council housing they’ve proposed in the last 10 years.
A brief aside. I’m only interested in council housing, good old fashioned, state owned homes. However, increasingly council hosuing units ar ebeing constructed as part of larger developemnts - this is part of councils having deals with provate developers where they claim a percentage of the units being constructed. These are often built as part of larger developments which might include ‘affordable’2 housing. Now ‘affordable’ is a catch all term used by the GLA which covers all not private sector housing, so in addition to council housing it can include:
Discount market rent: A type of buy to rent. Let at a discounted market rent, with the size of the discount determined by the LPA. London Plan says ideally discount market rent should be let at London living rent.
Discount market sale: New build property is sold at a discounted price, to help low and middle earners get onto the property ladder. Properties are available in partnership with the council at 20% below current market value. Have to fulfil eligibility criteria, live/work in borough and income in range.
Intermediate: Category covers discounted rent/sale homes which are above social rent. Idea to help people who cannot afford market prices, but who are unlikely to access social housing. GLA publishes information about prioritising key workers for intermediate rent/sale properties.
London living rent: Rent is set at or below a third of local household incomes. Residents have the opportunity to save and purchase the home on a shared ownership basis within 10 years.
Shared ownership: An affordable home ownership home where purchasers buy a proportion of the home, usually with a mortgage and deposit and pay rent to a landlord on the remaining unsold share.
I’m not considering these other types of ‘affordable’ hosuing because they are accessed via the private housing market, and as such are aimed fulfill a different purpose, and cater to a different group of people within the housing ecosystem.
Fig. 2 shows all the planning applications filed for new residential construction, resulting in at least one social housing gain, between the years on 2015 and 2025.
Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("units_by_year.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig 2: The number of planning applications filed by year which include at least one social housing unit gain. The colour coding represents the number of applications which are for developments where 100% of the units will be council housing (green), versus those where council housing units are proposed alongside other types of residential units (blue).
What about where these applictaions are located? Fig. 3 shows the planning applications located on a map. If you hover over you can find out more details for each planning application. x% of the 100% council housing developments being proposed are less than x units.
Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_proposed_london_cumulative_map.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig. 3: A map of all planning applications filed since 1/1/2015 where at least one council housing residential unit is proposed. The scatter points are scaled by the size of the development, and colour-coded according to the the type of development.
Where are they finding the space?
The lack of available land in London is often spoken about in the context fo the hosuign crisis. The GLA defines small sites, as plots of land measuring less than 0.25 hectares (thats about the size of). Looking at the planning applications, x% are for small sites, with almost x% of 100% council housing developments on sites less than y. Look at the applications these seem to be on land that is either brownfield, or which has exisitng unused infrastructure such as garages, end of terraces, or carparks.
Code
import plotly.io as pio
#| column: screen
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_proposed_london_cumulative_map_site_area.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()Fig. 4: A map of all planning applications filed since 1/1/2015 where at least one council housing residential unit is proposed. The scatter points are scaled by the size of the development (as above), and colour-coded according to the size of the site being proposed for development.
Are all councils the same?
There has been a far from equal contribution across the London councils, Richmond has proposed just 13 units over the last 10 years!
Code
import plotly.io as pio
# Load the saved Plotly figure from JSON
fig = pio.read_json("council_proposed_london_stacked_bar.json")
# Display it inline, fully responsive
fig.show()A case of quality over quantity?
A picture is starting to build of small scale building, of small number of residential units on small sites. We can see what some councils have built in this time.
Haringey has a really nice interactive map of their recent council housing developments. And so does Greenwich.
Looking at soem of these examples, they seem high quality, with heatpumps, solar panels, and accessible designs.
The icing on the cake, is that some are notably aestheticaly pleasing, going beyond the ‘New London vernacular’ which dominates the private market, and has been slated as ‘beige’3. A few recent award winning council housing projects in London include:
Chowdury Walk in Hackney which won the RIBA National Award 2024, and the Neave Brown Award 2024. Eleven two storey houses, on a plot which was previously garages and parking.
Tessa Jowel Court in Haringey, which was nominated for the 2023 Stirling Prize. Six council homes, and adjacent community play centre.
Harvey Gardens in Greenwich which won the New London Awards 2022. Four homes and six apartments for people over 60 years.
But don’t we need quantity?
The state recognises a responsibility to provide accommodation for it’s citizens, but that accomodation needs to not just be stable and affordable, but also of a quality that improves both our physical and mental health.
London, and the UK in general, desperately needs housing to fix the crisis. Have some old stock which is in a bad state, plus have some new builds coming to market which are extremely high quality. It’s great that they are high quality, nice to live in and sustainable for both the people and planet. But, have gaping hole of housing problems, and it’s like they’re trying to plug it with tiny marbles.
So, question is, are councils forced to build this type of housing because they don’t have the money to build more? Don’t have the resources to build more? It’s better value than retrofitting old stock of housing (they don’t have enough in house ways to do this – all through expensive contractors, so ends up being taken on by housing authority or developers, but then rising costs (or just capitalism) lead to the spaces becoming privatised)? Don’t have the physical space to build more (probably not, as some councils do have space, i.e. large brownfield sites, and they still aren’t building more)?
The London Plan 2021 developed by the Greater London Authority (GLA) set a slightly more modest goal of 66,000 residential units per year in the capital, of which 50% should be ‘’affordable’’’, a category which includes traditional council housing.
The code for the graphs can be found here: https://github.com/Bea-Taylor/london_council_housing. All the data used here is open source, and can be found linked in the notebooks.
Footnotes
At the other end of the scale in London, some former council blocks are now almost entirely sold off into private owenrships, becoming icons of 20th century Brutalism, commodifying the aesthetic of post war state-led urban developments. There’s an interesting critique of this ‘beautiful Brutalism’ trend here.↩︎
I use quotation marks here not just because I’m a cynic, but also since these ‘affordable’ prices are calculated with regard to the private housing sector which is an inaccessible bubble, and they are not calculated in terms of prices local people can actually afforded based on their salaries.↩︎
Their words not mine.↩︎